Google-Backed Asteroid Mining Venture Attracts Billionaires

Mining platinum-group metals and water from asteroids. Source: Bloomberg

Aug. 7 (Bloomberg) -- Planetary Resources Inc., an
asteroid-mining venture backed by Google Inc. executives, said
it added more billionaire investors and is nearing a partnership
agreement with a “top-10” mining company.

Planetary Resources has “new billionaires to add to the
list we’ve announced,” co-founder Eric Anderson said in an Aug.
3 telephone interview, declining to identify them. “There are a
number of other people you know who’ve decided to come on board
as investors. We’ve got a lot of people who are committed to the
long-term cause.”

The venture said in April it has the backing of Ross Perot
Jr., Google’s Chief Executive Officer Larry Page, Chairman Eric
Schmidt and former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. Co-Chairman John C.
Whitehead. The company aims to be the first to harness
potentially trillions of dollars of minerals including platinum
group metals by using robotic technology to mine asteroids.

“If their step-by-step road map goes to plan, I think it
could be quite promising in the longer term,” Ben Taylor, a
research fellow in the planetary environments team at the
University of Surrey in Guildford, England, said by phone. “We
can identify the minerals on the asteroids from orbital
surveying, but it becomes a question of whether it’s still going
to be cheaper to extract the very small amount that’s on earth
compared to the cost of extraction on an asteroid.”

While Planetary Resources has “enough funding for several
years of operations” including its initial prospecting
missions, the Seattle-based company would consider an initial
public offering for future financing needs, Anderson said.

Low Orbit

“I would love to take the company public someday,” he
said. “I think it’s really important for the public to have a
chance to be part of this, but not until we’re ready. We need to
fly to space first.”

Planetary Resources intends to launch a telescopic space
surveyor into Earth’s low orbit in less than two years to
identify potential metal- and water-rich asteroids and begin
prospecting within four years.

Platinum deposits on Earth originated on asteroids that
collided with the planet and a single metallic asteroid with a
500-meter diameter likely contains more than all that’s been
extracted on Earth, according to Planetary Resources.

There are currently 10,000 known so-called near-Earth
asteroids and 1,500 of those are “energetically as easy to
reach as the Moon,” according to the company’s website.

Richard Branson

It signed an agreement with Richard Branson’s Virgin
Galactic LLC last month enabling its Arkyd-100 low-Earth orbit
space telescopes to be launched via Virgin spacecraft. The
company hopes to sign an accord with a large mining company
within months and is seeking to partner with more firms,
Anderson said.

“We’re in discussions with a major mining company that is
certainly one of the top 10 in the world,” he said, without
naming the company. “It’s a very preliminary agreement that
would give them rights to co-invest with us and profit from
initial asteroid missions.”

Planetary Resources plans to identify water-rich asteroids,
essential “stepping stones” that could be used for refueling
rockets and explorers in future space adventures, Anderson said
in an April interview.

Partnering with a mining company “should be very useful
for them and obviously give them a lot more credibility in terms
of this actually getting off the ground and working,”
University of Surrey’s Taylor said. “They would obviously need
to be careful that not too many existing processes which work on
earth would be transferred to the space environment.”

NASA Veterans

Anderson said his company wanted the mining industry as a
partner, not as a competitor. “We’re not planning to recreate
the large mining companies of the world, we’re going to keep our
expertise to the space part,” he said on Aug. 3.

Planetary Resources has assembled a team of about 40
engineers, including National Aeronautics and Space
Administration veterans, to help advance its plan, Anderson
said.

“We are very cognizant of the fact this is a very long-term project, we’re not going to be returning platinum group
metals from asteroids tomorrow,” he said. “It’s going to take
a while.”

It also lists film director and producer James Cameron as
an adviser on its website. Google board member Kavitark Ram
Shriram and International Software Corp. founder Charles Simonyi
are also investors.

“Mining asteroids is clearly like eating a dinosaur. The
way you eat a dinosaur is one bite at a time,” Anderson said.
``We’re doing it one bite at a time.’’